Commentary on politics, culture, life and music.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Aaron's Song of the Day - Feb. 21, 2011 - "White House Blues" by Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys

We commemorate Presidents Day on ASotD with Bill Monroe's 1954 recording of "White House Blues," a tune written half a century earlier to dramatize the assassination of President William McKinley, for whom my grandfather was named. McKinley's death at the gun of anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Temple of Music in Buffalo ushered in Teddy Roosevelt as the nation's youngest president in history and one who began much of the progressive/modern liberal nonsense that this country is still saddled with to this day.

But back to this amazing track, one of my very favorite "superfast" numbers of the founding era of bluegrass, with amazing banjo by an otherwise obscure picker named Rudy Lyle, who happened to be in Monroe's Blue Grass Boys at the time of this session.